On 20 November 1942, the Corps started feeding its initial units into the attack, between Lake Tsatsa and Barmatsak when the 126th and 302nd Rifle Divisions of 51st Army began to advance on a three-mile front supported by the 55th and 158th Independent Tank Regiments from 4th Mech Corps; the advance was made against the Romanian 6th Corps, whose units, Erickson says, began to surrender as the tanks got in among their positions.

The Corps's main attack opened late, further down the line, with three mechanised brigades hugging one road instead of the planned three, and the left-flank brigades, 36th and 59th, running into minefields; however the attack went on, until a pause at Zety on the evening on 21 November for fuel and ammunition. On the morning of 23 November, 4 Mechanised Corps linked up with 4th and 26th Tank Corps in the Sovietskii-Marinovka area and the northern and southern pincers had met; the German Sixth Army was surrounded in Stalingrad.

Operation Barbarossa was the code name for the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union, which started on Sunday, 22 June 1941, during World War II. The operation stemmed from Nazi Germany's ideological aims to conquer the western Soviet Union so that it could be repopulated by Germans, to use Slavs as a slave labour force for the Axis war effort, to murder the rest, to acquire the oil reserves of the Caucasus and the agricultural resources of Soviet territories. In the two years leading up to the invasion and the Soviet Union signed political and economic pacts for strategic purposes; the German High Command began planning an invasion of the Soviet Union in July 1940, which Adolf Hitler authorized on 18 December 1940. Over the course of the operation, about three million personnel of the Axis powers – the largest invasion force in the history of warfare – invaded the western Soviet Union along a 2,900-kilometer front. In addition to troops, the Wehrmacht deployed some 600,000 motor vehicles, between 600,000 and 700,000 horses for non-combat operations.

The offensive marked an escalation of World War II, both geographically and in the formation of the Allied coalition. Operationally, German forces achieved major victories and occupied some of the most important economic areas of the Soviet Union and inflicted, as well as sustained, heavy casualties. Despite these Axis successes, the German offensive stalled in the Battle of Moscow at the end of 1941, the subsequent Soviet winter counteroffensive pushed German troops back; the Red Army absorbed the Wehrmacht's strongest blows and forced the Germans into a war of attrition that they were unprepared for. The Wehrmacht never again mounted a simultaneous offensive along the entire Eastern front; the failure of the operation drove Hitler to demand further operations of limited scope inside the Soviet Union, such as Case Blue in 1942 and Operation Citadel in 1943 – all of which failed. The failure of Operation Barbarossa proved a turning point in the fortunes of the Third Reich. Most the operation opened up the Eastern Front, in which more forces were committed than in any other theater of war in world history.

The Eastern Front became the site of some of the largest battles, most horrific atrocities, highest World War II casualties, all of which influenced the course of both World War II and the subsequent history of the 20th century. The German armies captured 5,000,000 Red Army troops, who were denied the protection guaranteed by the Hague Conventions and the 1929 Geneva Convention. A majority of Red Army POWs never returned alive; the Nazis deliberately starved to death, or otherwise killed, 3.3 million prisoners of war, as well as a huge number of civilians. Einsatzgruppen death-squads and gassing operations murdered over a million Soviet Jews as part of the Holocaust; as early as 1925, Adolf Hitler vaguely declared in his political manifesto and autobiography Mein Kampf that he would invade the Soviet Union, asserting that the German people needed to secure Lebensraum to ensure the survival of Germany for generations to come. On 10 February 1939, Hitler told his army commanders that the next war would be "purely a war of Weltanschauungen... a people's war, a racial war".

On 23 November, once World War II had started, Hitler declared that "racial war has broken out and this war shall determine who shall govern Europe, with it, the world". The racial policy of Nazi Germany portrayed the Soviet Union as populated by non-Aryan Untermenschen, ruled by Jewish Bolshevik conspirators. Hitler claimed in Mein Kampf that Germany's destiny was to "turn to the East" as it did "six hundred years ago". Accordingly, it was stated Nazi policy to kill, deport, or enslave the majority of Russian and other Slavic populations and repopulate the land with Germanic peoples, under the Generalplan Ost; the Germans' belief in their ethnic superiority is evident in official German records and discernible in pseudoscientific articles in German periodicals at the time, which covered topics such as "how to deal with alien populations". While older histories tended to emphasize the notion of a "Clean Wehrmacht", the historian Jürgen Förster notes that "In fact, the military commanders were caught up in the ideological character of the conflict, involved in its implementation as willing participants."

Before and during the invasion of the Soviet Union, German troops were indoctrinated with anti-Bolshevik, anti-Semitic, anti-Slavic ideology via movies, lectures and leaflets. Likening the Soviets to the forces of Genghis Khan, Hitler told Croatian military leader Slavko Kvaternik that the "Mongolian race" threatened Europe. Following the invasion, Wehrmacht officers told their soldiers to target people who were described as "Jewish Bolshevik subhumans", the "Mongol hordes", the "Asiatic flood", the "Red beast". Nazi propaganda portrayed the war against the Soviet Union as both an ideological war between German National Socialism and Jewish Bolshevism and a racial war between the Germans and the Jewish and Slavic Untermenschen. An'order from the Führer' stated that the Einsatzgruppen were to execute all Soviet functionaries who were "less valuable Asiatics and Jews". Six months into the invasion of the Soviet Union, the Einsatzgruppen had murdered in excess of 500,000 Soviet Jews, a figure greater than the number of Red Army soldiers killed in combat during that same time frame.

Corps is a term used for several different kinds of organisation. Within military terminology a corps may be: an operational formation, sometimes known as a field corps, which consists of two or more divisions, such as the Corps d'armée known as I Corps of Napoleon's Grande Armée); these usages overlap. Corps may be a generic term for a non-military organization, such as the U. S. Peace Corps. In many armies, a corps is a battlefield formation composed of two or more divisions, commanded by a lieutenant general. During World War I and World War II, due to the large scale of combat, multiple corps were combined into armies which formed into army groups. In Western armies with numbered corps, the number is indicated in Roman numerals; the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps was raised in 1914, consisting of Australian and New Zealand troops, who went on to fight at Gallipoli in 1915. In early 1916, the original corps was reorganised and two corps were raised: I ANZAC Corps and II ANZAC Corps. In the stages of World War I, the five infantry divisions of the First Australian Imperial Force —consisting of personnel who had volunteered for service overseas—were united as the Australian Corps, on the Western Front, under Lieutenant General Sir John Monash.

During World War II, the Australian I Corps was formed to co-ordinate three Second Australian Imperial Force units: the 6th, 7th and 9th Divisions, as well as other Allied units on some occasions, in the North African campaign and Greek campaign. Following the commencement of the Pacific War, there was a phased withdrawal of I Corps to Australia, the transfer of its headquarters to the Brisbane area, to control Allied army units in Queensland and northern New South Wales. II Corps was formed, with Militia units, to defend south-eastern Australia, III Corps controlled land forces in Western Australia. Sub-corps formations controlled Allied land forces in the remainder of Australia. I Corps headquarters was assigned control of the New Guinea campaign. In early 1945, when I Corps was assigned the task of re-taking Borneo, II Corps took over in New Guinea. Canada first fielded a corps-sized formation in the First World War; the Canadian Corps consisted of four Canadian divisions. After the Armistice, the peacetime Canadian militia was nominally organized into corps and divisions but no full-time formations larger than a battalion were trained or exercised.

Early in the Second World War, Canada's contribution to the British-French forces fighting the Germans was limited to a single division. After the fall of France in June 1940, a second division moved to England, coming under command of a Canadian corps headquarters; this corps was renamed I Canadian Corps as a second corps headquarters was established in the UK, with the eventual formation of five Canadian divisions in England. I Canadian Corps fought in Italy, II Canadian Corps in NW Europe, the two were reunited in early 1945. After the formations were disbanded after VE Day, Canada has never subsequently organized a Corps headquarters. Royal Canadian Army Cadets: A Corps size in the RCAC is different everywhere, depending on the size, the Commanding Officer can be a Captain or Major; the National Revolutionary Army Corps was a type of military organization used by the Chinese Republic, exercised command over two to three NRA Divisions and a number of Independent Brigades or Regiments and supporting units.

The Chinese Republic had 133 Corps during the Second Sino-Japanese War. After losses in the early part of the war, under the 1938 reforms, the remaining scarce artillery and the other support formations were withdrawn from the Division and was held at Corps, or Army level or higher; the Corps became the basic tactical unit of the NRA having strength nearly equivalent to an allied Division. The French Army under Napoleon used corps-sized formations as the first formal combined-arms groupings of divisions with reasonably stable manning and equipment establishments. Napoleon first used the Corps d'armée in 1805; the use of the Corps d'armée was a military innovation that provided Napoleon with a significant battlefield advantage in the early phases of the Napoleonic Wars. The Corps was designed to be an independent military group containing cavalry and infantry, capable of defending against a numerically superior foe; this allowed Napoleon to mass the bulk of his forces to effect a penetration into a weak section of enemy lines without risking his own communications or flank.

This innovation stimulated other European powers to adopt similar military structures. The Corps has remained an echelon of French Army organization to the modern day; as fixed military formation in peace-time it was used in all European armies after Battle of Ulm in 1805. In Prussia it was introduced by Order of His Majesty from November 5, 1816, in order to strengthen the readiness to war; the paramilitary forces of Pakistan's two main western provinces of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan are the Frontier Corps founded in 1907 during British Rule as at least three various organizations before being combined together. They are charged with guarding the country's wes

The Soviet invasion of Manchuria, formally known as the Manchurian Strategic Offensive Operation or the Manchurian Operation, began on 9 August 1945 with the Soviet invasion of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo. It was the last campaign of the Second World War, the largest of the 1945 Soviet–Japanese War, which resumed hostilities between the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the Empire of Japan after six years of peace. Soviet gains on the continent were Manchukuo and northern Korea; the Soviet entry into the war and the defeat of the Kwantung Army was a significant factor in the Japanese government's decision to surrender unconditionally, as it made apparent the Soviet Union had no intention of acting as a third party in negotiating an end to hostilities on conditional terms. Since 1983, the operation has sometimes been called Operation August Storm after U. S. Army historian David Glantz used this title for a paper on the subject; as agreed with the Allies at the Tehran Conference in November 1943 and the Yalta Conference in February 1945, the Soviet Union entered World War II's Pacific Theater within three months of the end of the war in Europe.

The invasion began on 9 August 1945 three months after the German surrender on May 8. Although the commencement of the invasion fell between the American atomic bombing of Hiroshima, on 6 August, only hours before the Nagasaki bombing on 9 August, the timing of the invasion had been planned well in advance and was determined by the timing of the agreements at Tehran and Yalta, the long-term buildup of Soviet forces in the Far East since Tehran, the date of the German surrender some three months earlier. At 11pm Trans-Baikal time on 8 August 1945, Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov informed Japanese ambassador Naotake Satō that the Soviet Union had declared war on Japan, that from 9 August the Soviet government would consider itself to be at war with Japan. At one minute past midnight Trans-Baikal time on 9 August 1945, the Soviets commenced their invasion on three fronts to the east and north of Manchuria: the Khingan–Mukden Offensive Operation. Though the battle extended beyond the borders traditionally known as Manchuria—that is, the traditional lands of the Manchus—the coordinated and integrated invasions of Japan's northern territories has been called the Battle of Manchuria.

Amassing over one thousand tanks and self-propelled guns, the 6th Guards Tank Army was to serve as an armored spearhead, leading the Front's advance and capturing objectives 350 km inside Manchuria by the fifth day of the invasion. The 36th Army was attacking from the west, but with the objective of meeting forces of the 2nd Far Eastern Front at Harbin and Tsitsihar; the 1st Far Eastern Front, under Marshal Kirill Meretskov, included: 1st Red Banner Army 5th Army 25th Army 35th Army 10th Mechanized Corps9th Air Army. The 1st Far Eastern Front was to form the eastern half of the pincer movement; this attack involved the 1st Red Banner Army, the 5th Army and the 10th Mechanized Corps striking towards Mudanjiang. Once that city was captured, this force was to advance towards the cities of Jilin and Harbin, its final objective was to link up with the forces of the Transbaikal Front at Changchun and Jilin thus closing the double envelopment movement. As a secondary objective, the 1st Far Eastern Front was to prevent Japanese forces from escaping to Korea, invade the Korean Peninsula up to the 38th parallel, establishing in the process what became North Korea.

The Battle of Stalingrad was the largest confrontation of World War II, in which Germany and its allies fought the Soviet Union for control of the city of Stalingrad in Southern Russia. Marked by fierce close quarters combat and direct assaults on civilians in air raids, it was the largest and bloodiest battle in the history of warfare. After their defeat at Stalingrad, the German High Command had to withdraw vast military forces from the Western Front to replace their losses; the German offensive to capture Stalingrad began in August 1942, using the 6th Army and elements of the 4th Panzer Army. The attack was supported by intensive Luftwaffe bombing; the fighting degenerated into house-to-house fighting. By mid-November 1942, the Germans had pushed the Soviet defenders back at great cost into narrow zones along the west bank of the Volga River. On 19 November 1942, the Red Army launched Operation Uranus, a two-pronged attack targeting the weaker Romanian and Hungarian armies protecting the German 6th Army's flanks.

The Axis forces on the flanks were overrun and the 6th Army was cut off and surrounded in the Stalingrad area. Adolf Hitler ordered that the army make no attempt to break out. Heavy fighting continued for another two months. By the beginning of February 1943, the Axis forces in Stalingrad had exhausted their ammunition and food; the remaining units of the 6th Army surrendered. The battle lasted one week and three days. By the spring of 1942, despite the failure of Operation Barbarossa to decisively defeat the Soviet Union in a single campaign, the Wehrmacht had captured vast expanses of territory, including Ukraine and the Baltic republics. Elsewhere, the war had been progressing well: the U-boat offensive in the Atlantic had been successful and Erwin Rommel had just captured Tobruk. In the east, they had stabilized their front in a line running from Leningrad in the north to Rostov in the south. There were a number of salients, but these were not threatening. Hitler was confident that he could master the Red Army after the winter of 1942, because though Army Group Centre had suffered heavy losses west of Moscow the previous winter, 65% of its infantry had not been engaged and had been rested and re-equipped.

Neither Army Group North nor Army Group South had been hard pressed over the winter. Stalin was expecting the main thrust of the German summer attacks to be directed against Moscow again. With the initial operations being successful, the Germans decided that their summer campaign in 1942 would be directed at the southern parts of the Soviet Union; the initial objectives in the region around Stalingrad were the destruction of the industrial capacity of the city and the deployment of forces to block the Volga River. The river was the Caspian Sea to central Russia, its capture would disrupt commercial river traffic. The Germans cut the pipeline from the oilfields; the capture of Stalingrad would make the delivery of Lend Lease supplies via the Persian Corridor much more difficult. On 23 July 1942, Hitler rewrote the operational objectives for the 1942 campaign expanding them to include the occupation of the city of Stalingrad. Both sides began to attach propaganda value to the city, based on it bearing the name of the leader of the Soviet Union.

Hitler proclaimed that after Stalingrad's capture, its male citizens were to be killed and all women and children were to be deported because its population was "thoroughly communistic" and "especially dangerous". It was assumed that the fall of the city would firmly secure the northern and western flanks of the German armies as they advanced on Baku, with the aim of securing these strategic petroleum resources for Germany; the expansion of objectives was a significant factor in Germany's failure at Stalingrad, caused by German overconfidence and an underestimation of Soviet reserves. The Soviets realized, they ordered that anyone strong enough to hold a rifle be sent to fight. If I do not get the oil of Maikop and Grozny I must finish this war. Army Group South was selected for a sprint forward through the southern Russian steppes into the Caucasus to capture the vital Soviet oil fields there; the planned summer offensive, code-named Fall Blau, was to include the German 6th, 17th, 4th Panzer and 1st Panzer Armies.

Army Group South had overrun the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1941. Poised in Eastern Ukraine, it was to spearhead the offensive. Hitler intervened, ordering the Army Group to split in two. Army Group South, under the command of Wilhelm List, was to continue advancing south towards the Caucasus as planned with the 17th Army and First Panzer Army. Army Group South, including Friedrich Paulus's 6th Army and Hermann Hoth's 4th Panzer Army, was to move east towards the Volga and Stalingrad. Army Group B was commanded by Field MarshalFedor von Bock and by General Maximilian von Weichs; the start of Case Blue had been planned for late May 1942. However, a number of German and Romanian units that were to take part in Blau were besieging Sevastopol on the Crimean Peninsula. Delays in ending the siege pushed back the start date for Blau several times, the city did not fall until early July. Operation Fridericus I by the Germans against the "Isium bulge", pinched off the Soviet

The 51st Army was a field army of the Red Army that saw action against the Germans in World War II on both the southern and northern sectors of the front. The army participated in the Battle of the Kerch Peninsula between December 1941 and January 1942; the army fought in the Battle of Stalingrad during the winter of 1942–43, helping to defeat German relief attempts. From late 1944 to the end of the war, the army fought in the final cutting-off of German forces in the Courland area next to the Baltic. Inactivated in 1945, the army was activated again in 1977 to secure the Kuril Islands. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the army continued in existence as a component of the Russian Ground Forces; the army was active during two periods from 1941 until 1997. The Army was ordered formed on 14 August 1941 in the Crimea based on the 9th Rifle Corps and other units as the 51st Independent Army under Colonel General F. I. Kuznetsov, with the task of guarding the Crimean Peninsula. Pavel Batov was appointed as his deputy.

Professor John Erickson in The Road to Stalingrad describes Stalin's rationale for the formation of the Army during a 12 August session within the Stavka war room: Stalin and the Stavka had concluded from the German moves underway at the time that a strike on the Crimea was and thus the formation of an Independent Army in the Crimea had been decided upon. Thus Kuznetsov was summoned, after a discussion, he was sent south to take up his new command; the army's initial forces included the 9th Rifle Corps, the 271st and 276th Rifle Divisions, the 40th, 42nd and 48th Cavalry Divisions, the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th irregularly formed Crimean Rifle divisions and a number of smaller units. However, due to what Erickson describes as Kuznetsov's'sticking blindly to the prewar plan', which anticipated a seaborne assault, leaving the Perekop and Sivash approaches too thinly held, Erich von Manstein, leading the German assault, was able to push past the defenses. Therefore, the Stavka ordered. In November the army was evacuated from the Taman Peninsula and it joined the Transcaucasian Front.

The army participated in the Kerch-Feodosiya landing operation in December 1941 – January 1942 alongside the 44th Army. 51st Army was planned to be the Kerch arm of the assault, but delays caused by bad weather and a schedule change prompted by renewed German attacks on Sevastopol resulted in 51st Army troops being landed at Capes Sjuk and Chroni during the night of 26–27 December 1941. The 44th and 51st Armies formed the Crimean Front under General Dmitri T. Kozlov, formally established on 28 January 1942, which hammered at Von Manstein's Eleventh Army. On 1 February 1942, 51st Army comprised the 138th and 302nd Mountain Rifle Divisions, the 224th, 390th, 396th Rifle Divisions, the 12th Rifle Brigade, 83rd Naval Infantry Brigade, 105th Separate Mountain Rifle Regiment, 55th Tank Brigade, 229th Separate Tank Battalion, artillery units, other support units. A German offensive was launched against the Front on 8 May 1942. Army commander Lieutenant GeneralVladimir Nikolayevich Lvov was killed by bomb fragments on 11 May while changing his command post.

The offensive concluded around 18 May 1942 with the near complete destruction of Soviet defending forces, which Erickson attributes to bickering between Kozlov and the Front commissar, Lev Mekhlis, a trail of incompetent actions. Three armies, 21 divisions, 176,000 men, 347 tanks, nearly 3,500 guns were lost; the remains of the force were evacuated. After the evacuation 51st Army joined the North Caucasian Front at Kuban. In July, Marshal Budenny received orders to combine the Southern Front and North Caucasian Front into a single formation retaining the title of North Caucasian Front, 51st Army joined the'Don group' of that front under General Lieutenant Rodion Malinovsky, along with the 12th Army and the 37th Army. On 22 July, army commander Major general Nikolai Trufanov was relieved of command; as part of the Stalingrad Front briefly with the Southeast Front, back with the Stalingrad Front it took part in the Battle of Stalingrad. On 31 July when it came under Stalingrad Front control it was so worn down by its previous rough handling that it was only 3,000 men strong.

It was attacked on the same day by the 4th Panzer Army, able to break through. During Operation Uranus, the counterattack from Stalingrad, the 4th Mechanized Corps began its attack from the 51st Army's sector. In early December, 51st Army was deployed to cover the Kotelnikovo approaches against German relief attempts by the LVII. Panzerkorps. On 24–25 December 1942, the commander of 51st Army, Major-General N. I. Trufanov, organized a local offensive operation on the right flank with the forces of three rifle divisions, moved to the north bank of the Aksav River, on the eve of the Kotelnikovo offensive operation, which defeated the German efforts made as part of Operation Winter Storm to relieve the Sixth Army in Stalingrad. On 30 January 1943, the Luftwaffe's Kampfgeschwader 51 destroyed the 51st Army's Headquarters, near Salsk. Dropping 100 – 250 kg bombs, a wave of Junkers Ju 88s and Heinkel He 111s destroyed the communications center, working offices of the chief-of-staff, the operational headquarters and the offices of the operational duty officer.

Up to 20 buildings and personnel billets were destroyed. Casualties among personnel were very high. After Janua

Sir Antony James Beevor, is an English military historian. He has published the 20th century in general. Born in Kensington, Beevor was educated at two independent schools, he went to the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, where he studied under the military historian John Keegan, before receiving a commission in the 11th Hussars on 28 July 1967. Beevor served in England and Germany and was promoted to lieutenant on 28 January 1969 before resigning his commission on 5 August 1970. Beevor has been a visiting professor at the School of History and Archaeology at Birkbeck, University of London and at the University of Kent, he revised his 1982 The Spanish Civil War in 2006 as The Battle for Spain, which keeps the structure and some language from its predecessor, but uses the updated narrative and detailed style of his Stalingrad book. The reworked release adds characters and archival research from Russia, he is descended from a long line of writers, being a son of "Kinta" Beevor, the daughter of Lina Waterfield, an author and foreign correspondent for The Observer and a descendant of Lucie Duff-Gordon.

Kinta Beevor wrote A Tuscan Childhood. Antony Beevor is married to biographer Artemis Cooper, his best-known works, the best-selling Stalingrad and Berlin - The Downfall 1945, recount the World War II battles between the Soviet Union and Germany. They have been praised for their vivid, compelling style, their treatment of the ordinary lives of combatants and civilians and the use of newly disclosed documents from Soviet archives, his 2012 book The Second World War is noted for its focus on the conditions and grief faced by civilians and women and for its "masterful" coverage of the war in East Asia. Beevor's expertise has been the subject of some commentary, he has appeared as an expert in documentaries related to World War II. Overall, his works have been translated into over 30 languages with over 6 million copies sold. In August 2015, Russia's Yekaterinburg region considered the banning of Beevor's books, accusing him of Nazi sympathies citing his lack of Russian sources when writing about Russia, promoting false stereotypes introduced by Nazi Germany during World War II.

Six years on April 23, 1953, the two districts were reunified as the Far Eastern Military District, with its headquarters staff in Khabarovsk, the staff being drawn from the former Commander-in-Chief of Forces of the Far East's staff. In 1966 Headquarters 29th Army Corps the 29th Rifle Corps, arrived from Krasnodar Krai, in the North Caucasus Military District; the 265th Motor Rifle Division arrived from the western end of the USSR in 1968. In mid 1969 29th Army Corps was redesignated 35th Army. Two more divisions, one a new activation were added to the new army in 1969. There were a corps headquarters and three divisions of the Soviet Airborne Forces, active in the district after the war. 37th Guards Airborne Corps had the 13th, 98th, 99th Guards Airborne Divisions, but the 99th was disbanded in 1956, the 13th disbanded in 1959 and the 98th transferred to Ukraine in 1969, leaving air assault brigades as the only Airborne Forces present. Among the air assault brigades formed was the 13th, activated 8.70 in Magdagachi, Amur Oblast, active until 1996.

The 83rd Air Assault Brigade arrived in Ussuryisk, Primorskiy Kray, in mid-1990, was transferred from the VDV to the District in 1995. In 1969 the staff of the 51st Combined Arms Army was formed on the basis of the staff of the 2nd Army Corps. Around 1988 the composition of the 51st Combined Arms Army of the Far Eastern Military District included: 33rd Motor-Rifle Red Banner Division 79th Motor-Rifle Sakhalin Red Banner Division 18th Machine Gun Artillery Division. In 1969 the 43rd Army Corps moved from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky to Birobidzhan. Toward the end of the 1980s the District included the 5th Army, the 15th Army, the 35th Army, the 51st Army (HQ Yuzho-Sakhalinsk, the 25th Army Corps with the 87th and 99th MRDs. On 11 October 1993 the 51st Army became the 68th Army Corps. 25th Army Corps became the headquarters of Ground and Coastal Defence Forces of the new North-Eastern Group of Troops and Forces in the Chukotka area. The District gained the vast Sakha Republic from the disbanding Transbaikal Military District following reorganisation in the late 1990s, which saw the disbandment of the 15th and 51st Armies.

After that 1998 reorganisation, forces within the District included the 14th Separate Brigade of Special Designation at Ussuriysk, the 5th Army, the 35th Army, HQ 68th Corps, four Motor Rifle Divisions, four Machine-Gun/Artillery Divisions. In April 2007 it was reported. Under naval command was the North Eastern Group of Troops and Forces, formed in 1998 and incorporating troops of the former 25th Army Corps; the North-Eastern Group was established in Kamchatka in 1998 "primarily because of the remoteness of the zone of responsibility in the North-East from the controlling structures, the Far East Military District, the Pacific Fleet". It was based on the headquarters of the Kamchatka Flotilla, it included the 40th Motor Rifle Brigade on the Kamchatka peninsula, which appeared to be at Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky and includes the 59th Separate Tank Battalion and 385th Separate Motor Rifle Battalion. In August 2007 the 40th Brigade become a

Operation Uranus was the codename of the Soviet 19–23 November 1942 strategic operation in World War II which led to the encirclement of the German Sixth Army, the Third and Fourth Romanian armies, and portions of the German Fourth Panzer …

Andrey Andreyevich Vlasov or Wlassow was a Russian Red Army general. During World War II, he fought in the Battle of Moscow and later was captured attempting to lift the siege of Leningrad. After being …

World War II, also known as the Second World War, was a global war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. The vast majority of the world's countries—including all the great powers—eventually formed two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis. A state of total …

Operation Barbarossa was the code name for the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union, which started on Sunday, 22 June 1941, during World War II. The operation stemmed from Nazi Germany's ideological aims to conquer the western Soviet Union so that it could be …

Clockwise from top left: German soldiers advance through Northern Russia; German flamethrower team in the Soviet Union; Soviet Ilyushin Il-2s flying over German positions near Moscow; Soviet prisoners of war on the way to German prison camps; Soviet soldiers fire artillery at German positions.

Plan of new German settlement colonies (marked with dots and diamonds), drawn up by the Friedrich Wilhelm University Institute of Agriculture in Berlin, 1942

The Battle of Uman was the German offensive operation against the 6th and 12th Soviet Armies — under the command of Lieutenant General I. N. Muzychenko and Major General P. G. Ponedelin, respectively. The battle occurred during the Kiev defensive operation between the …

KV-1 tank (1939); there were only 10 such devices in the 2nd Mechanized Corps out of almost 400 tanks, when it got an order to regroup to Uman.

Irinarhov

T-26 tank; this light-armored tank was a development of the British Vickers 6-Ton tank and at the summer of 1941 it was the most wide-spread Soviet tank. The 18th Mechanized Corps had 308 T-26 out of a total of 457 tanks and had no KV and T-34 at all.

BT-7M; BT tanks, noted by their high speed and thin armor, made up a significant part of the Soviet tank fleet in 1941. Breaking out of the Uman "cauldron", the chief of staff of the 6th Army Ivanov drove 200 km along the German rear on a BT-7M tank.

The Battle of Stalingrad was the largest confrontation of World War II, in which Germany and its allies fought the Soviet Union for control of the city of Stalingrad in Southern Russia. — Marked by fierce close quarters combat and direct assaults on …

The Barmaley Fountain, one of the symbols of Stalingrad, in 1943, right after the battle

German snipers at Voronezh, June 1942

Situation briefing near Stalingrad between a German company commander and a platoon leader

German infantry and a supporting StuG III assault gun during the battle

The Battle of Kursk was a Second World War engagement between German and Soviet forces on the Eastern Front near Kursk in the Soviet Union, during July and August 1943. The battle began with the launch of the German offensive, Operation Citadel …

2nd SS Panzer Division soldiers, Tiger I tank, in June 1943 just before the battle

Guderian being transported to the Eastern Front, 1943

A Raupenschlepper Ost, designed in response to the poor roads of Russia, moves materiel up shortly before the Kursk offensive.

The IS Tank was a series of heavy tanks developed as a successor to the KV-series by the Soviet Union during World War II. The IS acronym is the anglicized initialism of Joseph Stalin. The heavy tanks were designed with thick armor to counter German 88 mm guns and …

Šiauliai is the fourth largest city in Lithuania, with a population of 107,086. From 1994 to 2010 it was the capital of Šiauliai County. Unofficially, the city is the capital of Northern Lithuania. — Names — Šiauliai is referred to by various names in …

The Kliment Voroshilov tanks were a series of Soviet heavy tanks named after the Soviet defence commissar and politician Kliment Voroshilov and used by the Red Army during World War II. The KV series were known for their heavy armour protection during the early stages of the war, especially …

The T-34 is a Soviet medium tank that had a profound and lasting effect on the field of tank design. At its introduction in 1940, the T-34 possessed an unprecedented combination of firepower, mobility, protection and ruggedness. Its 76.2 mm high-velocity tank gun provided a substantial …

A T-34-85 tank on display at the Musée des Blindés in Saumur, April 2007

The Baltic Offensive, also known as the Baltic Strategic Offensive, denotes the campaign between the northern Fronts of the Red Army and the German Army Group North in the Baltic States during the autumn of 1944. The result of the series of battles was the isolation and encirclement of the Army …

Two Romanian armies, the Third and the Fourth, were involved in the Battle of Stalingrad, helping to protect the northern and southern flanks respectively of the German 6th Army as it tried to conquer the city of Stalingrad, defended by the Soviet Red Army in mid to late 1942. Overpowered and …

The BT-7 was the last of the BT series of Soviet cavalry tanks that were produced in large numbers between 1935 and 1940. It was lightly armoured, but reasonably well-armed for the time, and had much better mobility than other contemporary tank designs. The BT tanks were known by the nickname …

BT-7M, 1940, with tracks removed from the wheels and carried on the hull

BT-7 tanks on parade

BT-7A artillery support tank was a self-propelled gun variant, armed with a 76 mm howitzer.

The 5th Combined Arms Red Banner Army is a Russian Ground Forces formation in the Eastern Military District. — It was formed in 1939, served during the Soviet invasion of Poland that year, and was deployed in the southern sector of the Soviet defences when Adolf Hitler's …

Army headquarters at Ussuriysk

General Igor Rodionov, seen here while serving as Minister of Defence, commanded 5th Army from 1983 to 1985.

Corps is a term used for several different kinds of organisation. — Within military terminology a corps may be: — an operational formation, sometimes known as a field corps, which consists of two or more divisions, such as the Corps d'armée …

The 51st Army was a field army of the Red Army that saw action against the Germans in World War II on both the southern and northern sectors of the front. The army participated in the Battle of the Kerch Peninsula between December 1941 and January 1942; it was destroyed in May 1942 with other …

Constantin Constantinescu-Claps was a Romanian military commander during the Second Balkan War, World War I and World War II, condemned as a military criminal in the Communist Romania at the end of World War II. — From 1903 to 1905 he graduated from the …

Guards or Guards units were elite military units of Imperial Russia prior to 1917-18. The designation of Guards was subsequently adopted as a distinction for various units and formations of the Soviet Union and the modern Russian …

The Far Eastern Military District was a military district of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. In 2010 it was merged with the Pacific Fleet and part of the Siberian Military District to form the new Eastern Military …

Sir Antony James Beevor, is an English military historian. He has published several popular histories on the Second World War and the 20th century in general. — Early life and career — Born in Kensington, Beevor was educated at two independent schools; Abberley Hall …

The 37th Guards Airborne Corps was a Red Army airborne corps. The corps was established as the 37th Guards Rifle Corps on 19 January 1944. In August, it was converted into an airborne corps. On 18 December, it became an infantry corps again. The corps was converted to an airborne corps on 10 June …

The Musée d'Orsay is a museum in Paris, France, on the Left Bank of the Seine. It is housed in the former Gare d'Orsay, a Beaux-Arts railway station built between 1898 and 1900. The museum holds mainly French art dating from 1848 to 1914, including paintings …

The Porsche 956 was a Group C sports-prototype racing car designed by Norbert Singer and built by Porsche in 1982 for the FIA World Sportscar Championship. It was later upgraded to the 956B in 1984. In 1983, driven by Stefan Bellof, this car established a record that would stand for 35 years …

Vasco da Gama, 1st Count of Vidigueira, was a Portuguese explorer and the first European to reach India by sea. His initial voyage to India was the first to link Europe and Asia by an ocean route, connecting the …

Grace Patricia Kelly was an American film actress who became Princess of Monaco after marrying Prince Rainier III in April 1956. — After embarking on an acting career in 1950, when she was 20, Kelly appeared in New York City theatrical productions and more …

Grace Kelly, c. 1956

The Kelly family home built by John B. Kelly in 1929, in the East Falls section of Philadelphia

The Austrian Crown Jewels is a term denoting the regalia and vestments worn by the Holy Roman Emperor, and later by the Emperor of Austria, during the coronation ceremony and other state functions. The term refers to the following objects: the crowns, sceptres …

Donald Frank Cheadle Jr. is an American actor. Following early roles in Hamburger Hill, and as the gangster "Rocket" in the film Colors, Cheadle built his career in the 1990s with roles in Devil in a Blue Dress, Rosewood and Boogie Nights …